visualization

Winter Jungyo 2024 Opens in Miyakonojo

Andy Jungyo (巡業), Travel , ,

The Winter Tour has started in Miyakonojo, Miyazaki prefecture. At the bottom of this post, I have an interactive map that will show the path of this particular tour. One can imagine the London event that Josh wrote about yesterday will be very similar, though not a “Jungyo”.

These tours are a popular method of outreach for the Japan Sumo Association and it is a great way for fans to meet and mingle with their favorite wrestlers. I had the fortune of going to one such event this past summer. So, this picture is not from Miyazaki, but from Tachikawa. But I hope it gives a sense of the atmosphere. If you would like to read about my experience there, I wrote about it here. I encourage you to check out that post for background on Jungyo.

The Kyokai posted the schedule for the first event on Twitter. Takerufuji will be sitting for the oicho-mage demonstration and Terunofuji will have his rope tying demonstration and dohyo-iri, though he will not participate in bouts.

As for this tour, it starts in Miyazaki prefecture and will end in Okinawa. Miyazaki prefecture is a well known agricultural region in Japan. It’s known in particular for high-grade wagyu beef. That beef is celebrated in the Miyazaki Prefectural Government presents the Miyazaki Governor’s Award, which is a trophy in the shape of a cow. The winning wrestler receives the meat from one head of Miyazaki fine cattle, as well as chicken and produce.

This tour will also pass through Oita prefecture, whose Shiitake Cooperative provides the famous trophy filled with mushrooms. It will then go around Kyushu before passing over the Kanmon strait to Shimonoseki and hoofing it over to Hyogo and Osaka before flying down to the sun and sand in tropical Okinawa.

That brings us to the main reason I highlight these tours for foreign fans. They are a great way to get out of Tokyo and to see other areas of the country.

Interactive Tour Schedule

I’ve put an interactive map below with a tour schedule. This version allows the user to page through the Days as the tour progresses. I’ve defaulted to Day 2 so you can see the first leg of the long, circuitous path from Miyazaki to Okinawa. There are arrows on the left side, underneath “Tour Day”. Click on the right arrow to cycle toward Day 15 and the left arrow to go in reverse. Any feedback you have is appreciated.

Keiko Peers

Andy Stables (Heya), Visualization ,

A few days ago I posted a visualization about Heya. I gave it the “Banzuke Dashboard” slot under the Data Tools menu above. I will also embed it at the end of this post but I wanted to play around with an idea reader Bbbut had in the comments section. This visualization digs further into the issue Herouth raised about worthy practice opponents for the heya-gashira (部屋頭), or top-ranked rikishi of a stable.

I set two baselines, one at approximate Juryo level, the other at approximately the Makuuchi level. A few interesting things come out. While Sadogatake stable doesn’t have any sanyaku wrestlers and seems to have faded a bit with the decline of Kotoshogiku and the yo-yo rise and fall of Kotoeko and Kotoyuki, the stable has a slew of fairly even ranked wrestlers. Kokonoe stable is also duking it out with Sadogatake and Oitekaze for “The Dawg Pound” moniker as the dog-eat-dog internal competition for status must be fierce.

With the default setting I used for the visualization, Ishiura is a peer of Hakuho and Hoshoryu is a peer of Meisei. In the latter case, we get a sense of the difference in quality from Herouth’s tweet below. Use the slider feature at the bottom to tighten or relax that “peer buffer.”

This is also useful to look into competition at stables with no sekitori, like Otake, Shibatayama and Naruto. I’m interested in what feedback you all may have for how to tweak the buffer. Looking at Sakaigawa, for example, I got the idea for a “veteran boost” calculation. Toyohibiki has been in makushita division for a while now but he has serious sekitori experience, having won three Juryo titles and spending nearly a decade in the top ranks. Despite the injuries and lack of mobility, he will still have a wealth of technique pointers to offer many of the youngsters. Myogiryu is a grizzled vet himself, though.

I have not updated this for the Natsu banzuke or with the various retirements. Toyonoshima, for example, is still in my Tokitsukaze listing. Even in retirement, though, he will still have a lot of experience to offer Shodai and Yutakayama.

Sumo Stables For Beginners

Andy Banzuke, Haru Basho 2020 (Osaka), Kimarite (決まり手), Stables (Heya) , , , , ,

If you’re like me, the sumo stables (heya) are a rather daunting mystery. There are so many of them that even after all of these years, beyond a few famous ones, I still can’t tell my Futagoyama from my Nishikido. After all, there are 45 active stables and there have been significant changes in the past couple of years. There are also many former and a few active wrestlers, ready to spread their wings and set up their own new stables.

There are great resources online to help out. First, the Sumo Kyokai’s website has the Sumo Beya Guide with a list of the wrestlers and staff. In a pinch, it’s a great, current roster. Then, of course, the SumoDB has a ton of information on the stables of each wrestler and does a great job tracking the history of changes; wrestlers do move from one heya to another — usually because a stable closes and its wrestlers are absorbed by a second stable, or a new stable opens and rikishi follow their recruiter to his new home.

Excellent Heya Roster and Sumo Reference

Hat-tip to Bruce for this excellent reference book. It has a complete roster with mugshots of all the wrestlers at the time of printing, grouped with their heya. It also has the staff, including coaches, hair dressers, gyoji, and support staff…my go-to reference, especially when watching those lower division matches because it includes the all-important furigana to help me penetrate some of the more bewildering shikona.

To add to these resources, I put together a little dashboard that I hope you will find as helpful as I do. This helps me get even more of a sense of not only which wrestlers are in which stable but also where the stables draw their wrestlers from. I can also drill into the kimarite (or winning techniques) the rikishi prefer, as well as what they fall victim to.

Feel free to click around. You can select a heya from the radio buttons on the right on either tab and the banzuke will filter to only those wrestlers from your selected heya. On the first tab, you can also click on a shusshin to have the banzuke filter to the wrestlers from that shusshin and on the second tab, click on the individual wrestler’s name to filter the kimarite chart. The kimarite includes each wrestlers’ career record — not just Osaka.

Oitekaze: A Southern Stable

As an example, let’s take a look at Oitekaze-beya, home of Endo, Daieisho, and just about everyone else named Dai~~ and Tsurugisho. Curiously, Oitekaze oyakata seems to recruit exclusively from the southern half of Japan. Tatsunami-beya, on the other hand, picks guys from the far north, the far south, and around Kanto…skipping over much in between.

Daiei-oshi

On the second tab, you can see how well each wrestler did in Osaka in the top graph. In the bottom chart, you can discern his strengths and weaknesses. For Endo, we’ve got a clear preference for yotsu techniques while Daieisho prefers an oshi-battle, win or lose. You can get a sense that he will force the issue and not allow anyone near his belt while Endo is not quite as able to assert his preference.

I’m eager to hear what you discover about your favorite stables…or if it helps you find a stable to investigate further. I’ll update this with the current banzuke as we get closer to Nagoya Tokyo.

Jonokuchi Report: Match Day 2

Andy Kyushu Basho 2019 , , , ,

Aki is a firecracker. The sumodb statistics list him as 165cm and 68kg. For us Imperialists, that translates to 5′ 5″, the minimum height required to be a sumo wrestler, and 150 lbs. That’s about two inches shorter than Enho and ~60 pounds lighter. His opponent tonight was Higohikari whom, at 173cm and 119kg, fits near the average height and weight for the division. He’s a lifer, with a 2003 debut at the tender age of 15. Aki, on the other hand, is a youngster from Ibaraki who started his career in the summer of last year at 16. He was quick off the line with a solid tachiai, and then a final blast near the tawara.

Andy Walks Along Kochi’s Shimantogawa

After match day two Tosamidori, from beautiful, verdant Kochi prefecture, is the largest and oldest of the undefeated as the winners’ bracket has shifted quite early in this tournament to the young and relatively compact.

Of the heaviest 22 wrestlers in the division, comprising the rightmost six of the twelve bins in the weight histogram below, only four remain undefeated. Tosamidori is the only one in the top 10.

Senho won his second match, as did Akinishiki, Sawada, and Numano. I wonder if Numano is a Seinfeld fan? I updated the colors in the chart to make more sense. Green is good, this time, 2 wins and 0 losses. They’re clustered firmly on the right side of the graph with Chida being the tallest undefeated wrestler, followed by Sekizukayama and Senho.